Today, Valentine’s Day, we were treated to a tour of the Talca “embotelladora”, or bottling plant, in Godoy Cruz, Mendoza, Argentina.
¡Gracias, Anna Clara!
Talca (Oeste Embotelladora, S.A.) takes great pride in producing a “national” product. That is, an Argentine company, with Argentine owners and employees, making soda from Argentine ingredients, all for an Argentine market. (Unlike the giant multi-nationals like Pepsi and Coke.)
It is quite an operation–and what a wonderful place to discover black and white industrial/abstract compositions!
One of the too cool vehicles belonging to the owner, the “Panda truck”:
Soda pop has just gotta have gas:
Un “charco artĂstico“:
Stacks and stacks and stacks:
Bottles and bottles and bottles:
I liked this particular abstract, formed by towers of plastic-wrapped packing material and the anti-hailstone fabric above:
The Talca brand…in this region, only Coca Cola gives it much competition:
Another of my favorite images from this day. It definitely has that industrial look:
Some of the sophisticated machinery behind your Talca soda pop:
Another piece of useful, practical, and necessary equipment–this one a bit simpler than the previous example:
Water storage tanks:
Anna Clara, our tour guide (on the right), shows MarĂa Rosa what the two-liter plastic bottles look like before they are heated and formed (“blown out”) by the machine into actual soda bottles:
An abstract view of a box of bottle material:
The labeling machine whirs along at warp speed. I left a little color in there to help with understanding the flow. In general, I am not a big fan of selective color, but for a bog post, what the heck:
The controls on one of the machines:
The soda goes in and the cap goes on in another whirling dance:
The back-lighting helps check for potential impurities:
Another industrial view:
You can’t have huge quantities of soda pop without huge barrels of syrup:
And huge quantities of sugar are critical as well:
The spare parts room keeps the machinery running:
More spare parts organization…nuts, bolts, and screws, in this case:
One last industrial abstract–pallets of plastic-wrapped cans standing by for the labeling and filling lines:
